Posts from — March 2004

Socket's cute little Cordless Serial Adapter Bluetooth-enables any RS-232 serial device. [Hack the Planet] [A blog doesn't need a clever name]

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i'll take 10

Reasons for Booting Bush. Check out Reasons to Vote Out Bush. There are 167 reasons right now. You can add your own…. [TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime]

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some of these are not very good reasons, others…… are all the reason you should need.

Deutschland Grid. Germany plugs into national grid. The German government launches the Deutschland Grid, or D-Grid, a multi-year effort with IBM to use grid computing to tackle scientific research. [CNET News.com - Front Door] [The Mediaburn Radio Weblog]

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E-Science is picking up in europe, now all they need is a teragrid.

Google as context renderer. Martin Terre Blanche:
“I suspect that most Google searches have as much to do with getting a
feel for context as with locating something specific.”

Great examples
in there of how search engines and related tools help us sense the
landscape surrounding a term in an impressionistic manner. (Recall is another tool in that constellation, which Martin didn't mention.)

By the way, Martin has just pushed out a very interesting manifesto on social science research in the knowledge economy, “an attempt to make good ol' research methodology _less_ boring by dousing it in
a mix of lefty politics and techno-triumphalism.” [Seb's Open Research]

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interesting paper linked by seb. i'm not sure social science in the knowledge economy amounts to what the author says yet, but i will opine soon enough…

More Passion.

I saw it on Boing Boing: Steve Martin’s script notes for The Passion.

[AKMA’s Random Thoughts]

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akma points to a hilarious page…..

Scalextric Sportworld Slot-Racing System. JOEL JOHNSON –Elevating slot car racing far past 'toy' status, the Scalextric Sportworld system is an incredibly full-featured software suite that integrates with special race… [Gizmodo]

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mmmmm cool toy, too bad it won't work with a real computer.

Distributed Human Sorting of Internet Objects. I learn a lot from reading Ed Felton. In A Spoonful of Sugar he describes an absolutely brilliant method being used at Carnegie-Mellon to “label all the images on the web”…. [Discourse.net]

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it is my understanding that this is somewhat similar to the way spammers bypass visual control systems they open up a page, fill out the info, and send the visual symbol to someone trying to access a pron site, which then decodes teh visual signal, types it in, gets access to her pron, and the spammer gets access to the visually protected material, usually email addys.

More, and Worse. Last night, sometime around 9.30, there was a knock at my door. I live in a faculty residence on campus, so I knew that this was going to be a student, but I also knew immediately that something was wrong, because my students never just drop by. Standing on my… [Planned Obsolescence]

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this just makes me very sad about the state of affairs on college campuses. I think that this form of ideology that based on race/gender/etc. is very much being reified in the stressful climate of todays political regime.

USPTO acts against Eolas patent. A report by Robert McMillan (IDG News Service) says that on 25 February, the US Patent Office took a first step toward revoking Patent Number 5,838,906 issued in 1998 to Eolas Technologies for embedding interactive program elements in webpages (plug-ins).Last… [InternetPolicy.net]

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invalidating patents is appropriate more times than not in cases like this. the patent should be reserved for a true invention where you profit off of its use in the immediate future, it should not be used as a tool to punish people after the fact who figured out the technology themselves and have for some time. so if eolas would have produced and continued to pursue their licensing throughout their patent ownership, i'd be happy with it, but if they didn't then i'd say they abandoned the patent and thus invalidate it.

Portable Spy Station: Grundig Yacht Boy 400. JOEL JOHNSON — The Grundig Yacht Boy 400PE is ostensibly a portable marine device for tuning in AM/FM and shortwave radio stations (as the 'Yacht… [Gizmodo]

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i've wanted one of these for quite some time.